Top 1200 Grief And Mourning Quotes & Sayings

Grief is real because loss is real. Each grief has its own imprint, as distinctive and as unique as the person we lost. The pain of loss is so intense, so heartbreaking, because in loving we deeply connect with another human being, and grief is the reflection of the connection that has been lost. We think we want to avoid the grief, but really it is the pain of the loss we want to avoid. Grief is the healing process that ultimately brings us comfort in our pain.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

I remember tearing up the first time I read Nabokov's description, in 'Speak, Memory,' of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering muzhiks, with its astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning.

Having some form of structure to process and manage grief collectively surely helps: as someone put it to me, grief is like a landscape without a map. Another suggested that grief makes you a stranger to yourself.

Inherent in mourning is celebration. Mourning without celebration or some form of acceptance leaves you stuck.

Mindful grief means mourning and letting go of the past without expectation, fear, censure, blame, shame, control and so forth. Without such mindful grief, neither past nor person can be laid to rest.

All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But, what I've discovered is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place, and that only grieving can heal grief. The passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

'The Killing' has a really great combination of qualities: Even though it's very sad and deals with mourning and grief, it's still exciting. It's about real people and it doesn't shy from the painful points of life.

Acknowledgment of grief - well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder.

If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.

Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it - grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. […] It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Grief is the awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness.

We're seeing people in the streets because this last week [since November 8, 2016] was a week of grief and mourning and despair for many.

The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives.

Grief is natural; the absence of all feeling is undesirable, but moderation in grief should be observed, as in the face of all good or evil.

We hear the rain fall, but not the snow. Bitter grief is loud, calm grief is silent.

Family members have a personal stake in honoring and mourning their dead and objecting to unwarranted public exploitation that, by intruding upon their own grief, tends to degrade the rites and respect they seek to accord to the deceased person who was once their own.

One of the difficulties with grief research is that it risks making certain kinds of grief seem normal and others abnormal - and of course having a sense of the contours of grief is, I think, truly useful, one has to remember it's not a science, it's an individual reckoning, which science is just trying to help us describe.

Grief is accepting the reality of what is. That is grief's job and purpose-to allow us to come to terms with the way things really are, so that we can move on. Grief is a gift of God. Without it, we would all be condemned to a life of continually denying reality, arguing or protesting against reality, and never growing from the realities we experience.

I think the worst kind of grief is unacknowledged grief.

Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.

The most important part of the process of mourning is regularly reciting kaddish in a synagogue. Kaddish is a doxology, which Jewish tradition has mandated children to recite daily in a synagogue during the year of mourning for a deceased parent and then on the anniversary of his or her death thereafter.

Grief is a sign that we loved something more than ourselves. . . . Grief makes us worthy to suffer with the rest of the world.

Mourning doesn't always mean zen, mourning doesn't always mean somber, mourning can just be a celebration of a life of people. It's not always about wearing black and listening to a Sarah McLachlan song.

Many a smiling face hides a mourning heart; but grief alone teaches us what we are.

'The Babadook,' written and directed by a woman, is a gorgeously told female-focused story of grief, longing, loneliness, and what mourning can become.

Let mourning stop when one's grief is fully expressed.

It's better to keep grief inside. Grief inside works like bees or ants, building curious and perfect structures, complicating you. Grief outside means you want something from someone, and chances are good you won't get it.

You know, losing my husband in 2008, that was a completely unexpected thing. And that process of grief and mourning that has taught me a lot about life, and how we never know how long we have.

People ask me why I wear veils. I reply, I am mourning. Mourning what? Well I figure something shitty must be going on somewhere.

The grief we carry is part of the grief of the world. Hold it gently. Let it be honored. You do not have to keep it in anymore. You can let go into the heart of compassion; you can weep.

I always thought I'd be the one to go first. The world might be mourning an Everly Brother, but I'm mourning my brother Phil.

Social media reactions to celebrity death have taken on a predictable pattern: an outpouring of shock with expressions of grief, followed by a ghoulish need to know all the details, to see the scene of the death and the family in mourning. Then a post-mortem dissection of all the perceived flaws the celebrity had.

Now, we have inscribed a new memory alongside those others. It's a memory of tragedy and shock, of loss and mourning. But not only of loss and mourning. It's also a memory of bravery and self-sacrifice, and the love that lays down its life for a friend-even a friend whose name it never knew.

There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.

Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.

I always thought I'd be the one to go first. ... The world might be mourning an Everly Brother, but I'm mourning my brother Phil Everly. My wife Adela and I are touched by all the tributes we're seeing for Phil and we thank you for allowing us to grieve in private at this incredibly difficult time.

The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you. You know what I mean? I’ve always liked that phrase “He was visited by grief,” because that’s really what it is. Grief is its own thing. It’s not like it’s in me and I’m going to deal with it. It’s a thing, and you have to be okay with its presence. If you try to ignore it, it will be like a wolf at your door.

Grief is the agony of an instant. The indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

I think what I was unconsciously expressing in 'Black Rainbow' was a very abstract and metaphorical grief, in the way I had suppressed my grief about my mother dying. In retrospect I realise I started writing 'Mandy' as a sort of antidote to that, to sort of express those emotions, to purge that grief.

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

People talk about the pain of grief, but I don't know what they mean. To me, grief is a devastating numbness, every sensation dulled.

Grief is neither a disorder nor a healing process; it is a sign of health itself, a whole and natural gesture of love. Nor must we see grief as a step toward something better. No matter how much it hurts-and it may be the greatest pain in life-grief can be an end in itself, a pure expression of love.

There is nothing to be compared to this, 'cause we lost our brother, our hero. The world is mourning. We are mourning. The fans are mourning. It is unreal. Unbelievable.

I wake up in that state of grief when you can tell you've been mourning even in your sleep.

I wonder why bereaved people even bother with mourning clothes when the grief itself provides such an unmistakable wardrobe.

Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

John [Lennon] as a singer - the way he sings on "Twist and Shout" and the way he sings on "Strawberry Fields Forever" - is a very odd voice, in the sense that it seems to be celebrating but almost mourning at the same time. There's a quality of mourning to his voice, which is very enigmatic.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief

I don't think grief of grief in a medical way at all. I think that I and many of my colleagues, are very concerned when grief becomes pathological, that there is no question that grief can trigger depression in vulnerable people and there is no question that depression can make grief worse.

What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.

It is good to divert our sorrow for other things to the root of all, which is sin. Let our grief run most in that channel, that as sin bred grief, so grief may consume sin.

When John Coltrane passed, we were in the church for the memorial. Albert Ayler came walking in playing, real out there. He was actually mourning through his horn. Mourning, but it was also like a call to wake up. Wake up!

We collected in a group in front of their door, and we experienced within ourselves a grief that was new for us, the ancient grief of the people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed in every century.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

What is the difference between grief and mourning? Mourning has company.

New Orleans taught me that mourning takes many different forms. Where I'm from, mourning is spirited. It is loud.

I haven't written adult fiction, but I do not sugarcoat grief - or what I expect grief to be.

I've got to worry about Alonzo Mourning, because a year or two ago there was a chance that Alonzo Mourning wouldn't be standing here talking to you. That's the cold reality of it.

I wasn't the only orphan in Guatemala. There are many others, and it's not my grief alone, it's the grief of a whole people.